Environmental Commitment, It Shouldn't End
Let me start by saying we have always been conscious of how much garbage we produced within our facility. When we first opened we knew that cardboard was going to be a huge issue, we go through a lot of it from the products that come into our manufacturing facility and restaurant. In order to try and prevent any of it from going to landfill we contacted a recycling company to have it removed on a bi-weekly basis. We can easily fill a 4yrd recycling container every two weeks with cardboard.
Then early last year (2009) we took a look at how much garbage we used. One of our largest contributors to our garbage build up was the amount of trimming we needed to do on our raw products. We found a pork distributor who would cut to our specifications. Initially the cost to us was slightly more for the raw product; although we didn't need to deal with as much raw meat refuse (none) and our staff no longer had to use sharp knives to trim fat caps for the pork shoulder. We also found a beef producer who was able to trim and cut our beef products to spec as well. You might think that the trimmed refuse (raw meat) was now just garbage somewhere else. It wasn't, the trimmed product we couldn't use (fatcap on both products) was now being used somewhere else in the production cycles of our producers. No loss at all. This allowed us to contact our garbage contractor and ask them to cut back the amount they picked up from us, it went from weekly to bi-weekly pickups. Less garbage in the landfill, less carbon emissions from the trucks picking up every week, wins all around.
On Friday May 27th I was sitting down with my staff in the early morning discussing with them a few ideas my Corporate Chef and I had discussed in the past. We needed their buy in as they would be the ones taking care of the project from the start. I wanted Buster Rhino's to stop leaving such a large environmental garbage footprint around, without hurting our business model or bothering our customer base.
For those of you that have been here in the past you know that we use take out containers for every meal we serve. In order, it went fry boxes, sandwich wraps then Styrofoam containers, on any given Friday we would easily fill 5 garbage bags full of used take out containers. This was with the pop cans / bottles all removed for recycling as well (another bag of those). This HAD to change, I was disgusted and disheartened by the sheer amount of garbage we were able to build up in just one day.
I was worried my staff might not buy into the whole idea; I showed them the containers that we felt would work for the customers who ate in as well as the paper that would be used to line them. The response I received from my staff was overwhelmingly supportive. The idea was also floated by that we should purchase Brita water filters and plastic reusable cups and offer that instead of bottled water to our customers. With the buy in from my employees the purchases were made for the products.
I was able to purchase all the items needed in order for this to work, 4 Brita water filters, 36 water cups, 36 food trays, 2000 liners for the trays. We were going to start the process on the busiest day of the week, what were we thinking. It only took about 2 minutes for my staff to get used to using the baskets and liners and a few minor process (movement) adjustments and they were off and running. My customers on the other hand were fantastic about the whole move, they loved the idea of using the tray's and liners versus the take out containers - they bought into it immediately and hole heartedly.
The water is a completely different story, we actually take a loss on not selling as much bottled water in our facility. Not only do we take a loss, the cost of supplying tap water through brita filters costs us money both in the filter as well as the time it takes for staff to refill the jugs as well as cleaning the cups and replacing the filters about once a month. With the cost of doing this in mind we took a twitter poll to see what people felt about paying for Brita filtered water. The response was about 60% saying they would happily pay vs. 40% who refused to every pay for water. Our decision was to allow people to drink the water for free, and leave a donation jar there to help cover any of the expenses that we incurred through the program. We decided as a whole (staff and management) that if there were any money left in the fund at the end of each month we would donate it to the local food banks.
At the end of the day for my small restaurant there was an initial outlay of roughly $350.00 of costs to build this simple yet effective system. There will be some recurring costs such as the tray liners which we already had in the take out dishes, replacement trays from loss and theft (yes theft), and replacement water filters. On Friday May 28th we only had to throw out .5 of a bag of garbage, which in itself is a huge accomplishment. This may not seem like much on a daily basis, if you look at it over a year it will be around 500 bags of garbage we do not throw out.
Thank you to my great customers and outstanding staff in helping make sure this works.
|
